Wednesday, December 17, 2008

One of the easiest and quickest things you can do for your sales team is to deliver them an list of leads, who have shown interest by visiting your website, to their email Inbox on a daily or weekly basis.

If you do this, there will definitely be requests from your sales team for tweaks and changes to the rules of when leads are delivered, how frequently, and what information is contained in the email. This is a good sign as it means that sales is engaging with the leads you are sending and is interested in them as a critical source of new business.

To get started, go into Reporting -> Report Admin and choose "New Email Update" from the drop-down menu for the user you wish to configure (you'll need each sales person to have a user created in Eloqua first).

Configure the subject line for the email, the address to send it to, how you want the reports delivered, and delivery timing (daily, weekly, etc). Then, you are all set, and just need to add reports to the update that will be delivered by email.

You can add existing saved reports, or create new saved reports to be sent. Often, you will have more than one report being sent, but we'll just walk through creating one.

Create a new report, and under Visitor Profiles, choose the Visitors by Profile Field Value report. We'll send a list of any Visitors who have been on the website if they are known to be the right salesperson.

Choose the "Salesperson" profile field, and type in the value of the salesperson you are configuring this report for. Note that this is looking for an exact match, so make sure that you know exactly how the data in the salesperson field is structured. Often this field is synchronized from your CRM system, so the data will be exactly as that system stores it.

Save that report, and add any other reports to your email update. They will be delivered according to the schedule you have set up, and will give your sales team an up to date view of the prospect who are taking interest in your marketing and visiting your website.

As you get more familiar with profile data and your web visitors, you will be able to more precisely select and target the leads that your sales team is interested in. To configure exactly what information is shown in the email updates, you can configure the Visitor Profile View - selecting the fields to be shown and the order to show them.

These emailed reports are often best to send weekly, and your sales team will adjust their use of them as they deem appropriate. It will often lead to more requests from sales in terms of real-time alerts, visibility into this data from their CRM system, or more precise scoring of leads. These are all great conversations to be having with your sales team as you work to align sales and marketing more closely.

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About

Eloqua Artisan is a blog about using the Eloqua platform. I cover topics from lead scoring, marketing automation, and web profiling, to CRM integration, marketing analysis, and social media. I welcome anyone to join the conversation.

Many of the techniques explored on this blog are related to topics in my recently published book, Digital Body Language, while some are general tips and techniques learned working with our clients as CTO of Eloqua.